“Hey,” she says, poking her head into the room like a tentative groundhog emerging from its hole. Fluff whines in the hallway behind her. “Hush now,” says Penn. “The grown-ups are talking.” Then, to me: “Have you noticed Fluff acting strange lately?”
“Not unless you count walking into walls as strange.”
“That’s the thing. He doesn’t really do that anymore.”
“He just did it, like, a couple nights ago.”
Penny rolls her eyes. “Well, I haven’t seen him do it, darling.”
My sister goes through these phases where she gets completely obsessed with a thing, and when she’s in one of those phases, that thing is the only thing. Currently, that thing is Audrey Hepburn movies, which means she won’t quit bugging me to watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s with her, and she’s always walking around the house, calling everyone darling.
“He’s barking again,” she says. “Have you noticed?”
Fluff yaps from the hallway like he’s showing me what she means.
“I’m afraid things are beginning to weirden for him.”
“I don’t think weirden is a word, Penn.”
“Well, it should be. And doesn’t he seem a little, I don’t know—better?”
“Better how?”
“More agile, I suppose.”
“Penny, even when Fluff was agile, he wasn’t very agile.”
She still lingers in the doorway, her head in my room, the rest of her in the hallway with Fluff. “Anyway, the real reason I popped in was to check on our appointment tonight.”
“Ah. You’ve found a new way of putting it, I see.”
“I assure you, Noah, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re referring to.”
“Not even the faintest?”
“Noah. Darling. Listen. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Now, I can’t help you if you’re not going to be reasonable.”
“Okay.”
“As it is, your position on Breakfast is entirely unreasonable.”
“I love breakfast.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do.”
Penny clears her throat, and when she finally steps fully into the bedroom, I can almost feel a hiccup in the floor, as if my minimalistic decor is unable to digest the colors and quirks of Penny Oakman. Today she’s wearing old black high-tops, bright pink tights embroidered with both skulls and hearts, a skirt whose color might best be described as “in the fuchsia family,” an I HEART NYC T-shirt, and a black mess of hair that looks like she went to a salon and asked for the Bellatrix Lestrange.
“Stay,” she says into the hallway. (Cue Fluff’s Where’d Penny go? whine.) She walks across the room and hands me an envelope with my first and last name inscribed on the front, her stature and movements indicating the officialness of the gesture. “Here. I’ve composed a list of reasons why you should reconsider your position on Breakfast at Tiffany’s and, in particular, why you should watch the movie with me. Feel free to read it at your leisure, darling, though sooner rather than later would be preferable.”
She pronounces leisure like le-zure, and rather like rotha, because of course she does.
I stick the envelope in my pocket, try my best to keep a straight face. “I’ll take it into consideration.”
“Wait, what are you doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“You just put it in your pocket.” Penny eyes the side of my pants as if the pocket ate her letter whole.
“Where should I keep it?”
“You’ll forget about it in there,” she says.
“I will not.”
“Oh, really?” Penny taps her foot in a perfect Mom-mimic. “Remember that time you put a Kit Kat in your pocket, and then forgot about it—”
“Okay.”
“And a couple hours later everyone thought you shit your pants?”
“Don’t say shit, Penn. And seriously, I won’t forget. Here, look. I’ll set the timer on my phone, okay? As a backup.”
“So when the timer goes off, you’ll read the letter?”
“Absolutely. I will read it and consider all the wisdom contained therein.”
Penny nods curtly. “That’s all I ask.” Fluff barks out in the hallway, to which Penny says, “All we ask, that is. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an important engagement to attend to.”
“Just so you know, eighth grade is a little less important than one might think.”
“Maybe for you, it was,” she says on her way out the door. “But I plan on being an absolute smash, darling.”
19 → OMG
Taking the long way to school means catching Old Man Goiter on his route. I slow down just a little between Mill Grove and Ashbrook, and there he is: the cane, the fedora, the potato-sized goiter on the left side of his neck, the man himself. Who are you, OMG? A retired shepherd? A war hero? A fast-food tycoon? Today I imagine him in his youth, an up-and-coming restaurateur in Paris, American expat from Alabama made good in haute société, all voulez-vous coucher avec moi? I approach slowly, try not to crane my neck as I pass. There’s that grim look, as always, God love him. OMG definitely understands the inherent value of walking. He never takes his eyes off the sidewalk, resolute in his decision to walk at this time, in this place, every—single—day.
Nothing cheers me up like OMG.
By the time I pull into the Iverton High parking lot, I’m barely even depressed about the beginning of the school year.
“Noah!”
Tyler Massey, one of those kids whose popularity is a mind-boggling mystery, as it sure seems no one likes him. I almost pretend not to hear, but you have to keep guys like Tyler fed or they’ll follow you around all day, taking little bites, just nibbling you down to the bone without you even knowing. Best to give him the entire helping up front.
“Hey, Tyler,” I say, climbing from my car, but I can tell how this is going to go, and suddenly I wish I could go back in time, pull over, and walk with OMG, ask him where he’s really from and why he does what he does, and we could chat about my Strange Fascinations, and I could finally tell someone the truth, how I think he and the Fading Girl probably understand the dangers of living outside the robot, and OMG listens, and lo! the world emerges a beautiful and glorious place.
Tyler Massey grabs his crotch, jiggles it around. “How they hanging, dickwad? You pop your cherry this summer or what?”
I fucking hate high school.
20 → one school is like the other
If one followed the branches of the Oakman family tree (or the “Oak Tree,” as my dad once called it), one might stumble across my mother’s brother, Orville O’Neill, proud owner of Orlando Orville’s School of Human Flight.
Uncle Orville and Uncle Jack were identical twins, best friends, and pretty much operated in all the same ways. Mom was a mess when Jack died, but Orville took it the hardest. We only see him once a year now, at Thanksgiving, and even though it always falls right around the anniversary of Jack’s death, we never talk about him. (Or maybe we never talk about him because it falls around the anniversary, what do I know.) But for someone like Uncle Orville—whose favorite topic of conversation is the human free fall, who lives alone, and who sends VHS tapes of his company’s regional commercials to the people in his life who are obligated to at least pretend to like them (aka his family)—it’s safe to assume Orville sees the Thanksgiving table as offering more than one kind of feast.
“People think skydiving is just jumping out of a plane,” he said last year between bites of cranberry sauce. “There’s a lot more to it than that.” Uncle Orville went on to talk about “static-line jumps,” which, as I understood it, was the equivalent of skydiving with training wheels. Basically, a cord called the “static line” was connected from the plane to the jumper’s parachute deployment bag (or, as Uncle Orville refer
red to it, “the d-bag,” because of course). The jumper had a very limited free fall before the parachute’s rip cord was automatically pulled by the static line.
I’d remained silent for most of the meal, but I had a question. So when talk at the other end of the table turned to the state of the Bears’ season, I knew I’d found my moment. “Uncle Orville,” I said, tapping him on the shoulder.
“What’s up, slugger?”
Uncle Orville, in keeping with that constitutional amendment dictating that all kids have no fewer than one uncle refer to them in athletic terminology, snubbed the usual suspects of sport and big guy and chose the dark horse, the far more eloquent slugger.
“Well, I was wondering—”
“You want a splat story,” he said.
“Um. What?”
My uncle held his left palm up, then raised his right hand and slowly let it fall until one met the other, at which point he made an explosion sound. “A splat story.”
Much as I hated to admit it, in that moment Orville got me.
He took a sip of iced tea, shrugged. “Had this student on his second static-line jump whose parachute didn’t open. Now, if he’d been in an accelerated free fall . . . major splat. Lucky for him, the static line turned out to be more of a lifeline. When the cord reached its end—phhht. It caught him. He just hung there, getting dragged by the plane. Actually, it reminded me a little of waterskiing, only, you know, in the sky.”
Waterskiing in the sky. I couldn’t make this shit up.
“Sounds dangerous,” I said.
“Oh, it was. Took nine guys to pull him back in. Dude was in shock, spent a bunch of time in the hospital, his back never was the same. He tried suing, but you basically sign away your life when you dive, so that went nowhere fast.”
The other end of the table was still talking Bears football, while our little corner was silent for a second. And then . . .
“Wakes me up in the middle of the night,” said Uncle Orville.
“It was a close call.”
“Well, yeah, that . . . but also . . .”
“What.”
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just—sometimes I dream I’m him. Dangling thousands of feet aboveground, gripping my bag, just hanging on for dear life.”
And I realized: that was high school.
21 → joyous virgins
I grip my bag, hold on for dear life as masses of kids zip through the hallway.
“I’ve decided to bring back duh,” says Alan, handing me a breakfast burrito. Breakfast at the Oakman household usually consists of the latest in flaxseed technology, some new concoction for which Dad needs a family of guinea pigs before officially introducing it on his menu. Most mornings my stomach is growling like a grizzly by the time I receive the text from Alan. Sonic order, yo! Burrito or sammy?
“What do you mean, you’re bringing back duh?” asks Val.
Alan is all, “Which part requires explanation?” to which Val says, “You can’t bring back a word that was never in to begin with.”
Alan sighs dramatically. “Come on, Val. Duh was in big-time.”
It started freshman year: we’d meet by the front doors, walk to the opposite end of the school where the unused lockers came together in this little pocket of semi-seclusion we dubbed “the Alcove.” The three of us would sit on the hallway floor, backs against the wall, legs outstretched mere inches from the rushing current of shoes, excited discussions of who was supposedly with whom, and what so-and-so said or did, or what they didn’t say or do, and God, can you believe this or that, and oh me-oh-my, I know, isn’t it all just hilarious or awful or unfair or boring?
Mostly, the three of us sat in the Alcove united in our belief that we were, in fact, living our best lives.
“Okay, then,” says Val as we plop down our bags and claim our spot on the floor. “If you’re bringing back duh, I’m bringing back rad.”
“News flash,” says Alan. “Rad was never out.”
“The fact that you just used news flash in a sentence negates your opinion on the subject of what’s in and what’s out.”
I chew my breakfast burrito, staring blankly into the raging current, grateful for the mindless discussion. It makes things feel normal, or if not normal, it at least distracts from the elephant in the room: how each of us had gone our separate ways from the Longmire party two nights ago and how we hadn’t spoken of it since.
Val nudges my arm. “Are you still hungover or something?”
“Um, no.”
“You’re, like—totally zoned right now.”
“Sorry,” I say. “End-of-summer blues, I guess. Plus, I ran into Tyler this morning, so my day was pretty much shot before it even started.”
“Tyler Walker?”
“Massey.”
“Oh God,” says Val. “Yeah, that’s rough.”
“Let me guess,” says Alan. “He made some crude sexual remark? Something about you being a flamer or popping cherries or having a small wiener.”
“He did, actually,” I say.
Val scrunches her face. “Don’t say wiener.”
“Tyler’s a chronic turd,” says Alan. Then, through a mouthful of egg and cheese: “Which is a shame, ’cause otherwise, he’s kind of cute.”
Val says, “Yeah, you’re a real catch yourself,” to which Alan kisses a bicep and belches.
“Seriously, though,” he says. “Do you know anyone who talks about sex more frequently or with less personal knowledge than Tyler Massey? He’s one of the world’s more tragic virgins.”
“Which would make people like Noah what?” says Val, winking at me. “Joyous virgins?”
Alan stops chewing mid-bite. “Why does that sound familiar?”
I stare at my boots and wonder if it’s possible for my feet to blush. “Um, ninth grade. Your parents’ basement.”
Alan ramps into uncontrolled laughter, and Val is all, “What’s funny?” and Alan explains a particular hiccup in ninth grade when he’d had an especially bad day at school where he’d been called some especially cruel names, and so, upon arriving home, decided to dedicate the weekend to turning himself straight.
“Yeah, you can’t do that,” says Val.
Alan brushes crumbs off his shirt. “Duh, Val. Duh.”
“So what did you do?”
Alan can’t stop chuckling, so I take over. “Alan thought maybe if he watched, you know . . . straight . . . porn . . .” Call me a prude, but I’m uncomfortable with the word almost as much as I am the thing itself. “Anyway. As you probably know, your parents get Cinemax.”
“Cinemax, seriously?” says Val. “Ever heard of the Interwebs?”
“Ever heard of parental controls?” says Alan. “Search histories, Net Nanny, et cetera?”
“Not to mention malware,” I say.
Val shakes her head. “You guys are cute in, like, the saddest way possible. Wait, what does this have to do with joyous virgins?”
Back to staring at my boots. “It was the title of the late-night special that evening.”
Val loses it, joining Alan in his already-lost-it, at which point I can’t help losing it too. “So some bullies call you names,” says Val, “and you decide you’re all in for conversion therapy.”
“Okay, first off,” says Alan, “I was a freshman. And second, it wasn’t just name-calling. Remember how obsessed I was with Iron Man?”
“How obsessed you were with Iron Man?”
“Tony Stark is the man, Val. Always with a different girl, and, I don’t know, it’s not like there was some kick-ass gay superhero I could look up to.”
Jackson, this six-foot-something teammate of ours, walks up and asks how my back is doing. “Better, I think,” and I throw in a “We’ll see,” for good measure. He gives a fist bump to Alan, then to me. “Praying for you, dude,”
and he’s gone, taking our lighthearted laughter right along with him.
There are times when I wonder if Val and Alan know about my back being fine. We’ve been friends so long, it’s like lying into a mirror and expecting myself to buy it. If they do know, they haven’t said a thing about it.
A song plays over the loudspeaker—two minutes until homeroom. We gather our things, walk in silence, and I imagine what it was like before the Powers That Be switched scheduling to A Day and B Day, back when everyone had to use lockers because they had more than four classes a day. (If I think about it too much, it makes me sad. Just these empty, useless metal boxes. I can’t really explain it.)
Alan bends down to tie his shoe, glances over his shoulder at his own ass, then at me, all, “See something there you like?” and I’m all, “You wish,” and, “Oh my God,” says Val, “you guys are children.”
“Please,” says Alan. He stands, and we resume walking. “Noah and I are giants among men. Isn’t that right, No?”
“You are really tall.”
“Stalwart citizens of a more refined age.”
Val points to Alan’s mouth. “You’ve got green pepper in your teeth.”
Alan puts his head down, scrapes his teeth with his fingernail, and peels off into their classroom. Before walking in behind him, Val says, “Your best friend’s a moron, you know that, right?”
“Duh.”
“Rad.”
22 → dinge beginnen für Norbert weirden zu bekommen
It was one of those things that didn’t register at the time, but as the day wore on, and homeroom became first block, then second and third, the more I thought about it, the less it made sense.
Remember how obsessed I was with Iron Man?
How obsessed you were with Iron Man?
It was like someone planted those two lines in my head this morning, and now here I was in AP German with an oak in my brain.
“Bratwurst, poltergeist, pretzel, blitzkrieg.” Herr Wein-garten is in the middle of his annual first-day-of-the-year speech, which inevitably outlines all ways the German language is superior to English. As the fourth year of an elective, it’s a tight-knit group; other than one new kid, we’ve all been here from the beginning. “Bildungsroman, sauerkraut, schadenfreude—just a few examples of commonly used words the English language jacked from Deutsch.”